Saturday, June 04, 2011

It's been a busy few months and now I'm ready for a rest and change of scene. So next week I'm heading off to England, Wales and then Greece for four weeks. It will be a reunion with cousins and friends but also a chance to explore some new territory when I go down to the Mani peninsula in the Peloponnese.

I just finished round #1 of the edits on my Shadow of the Lion manuscript. I did the spell-checks, formatting and cut a lot of chapters and repetitious passages, but it still need major cutting. So I will hopefully get a couple of pairs of extra eyes looking through it while I'm away, to make suggestions on what else can be cut. Although it wasn't too difficult a task, there are many places where I liked the writing and story and was afraid to cut just in case it would spoil the flow of the prose, or leave gaps in the story. Someone removed from the story and writing will be better able to decide on this. As a whole I am very happy with the novel and pleased with the writing so there wasn't much to be done in the way of revisions. Most had been done during the work on it, when I did a lot of block editing according to notes taken at my workshop group.

This term was busy with my classes as well and I was beginning to feel a little burned out by the time I got to the end last week. Only one goes all summer, and that's my little group at WAVES coffee shop on Monday mornings. I have someone to spare for me while I'm away. And in July, after my return, the school board has me scheduled for two nights of memoir classes.

Last week I was asked to present about writing travel memoirs at a travel writer's symposium, I've also been contributing new stories to www.EuropeUpClose.com There should be three more stories coming up soon, one on St. Fagans Heritage Park in Cardiff, one about Parga, Greece and another about the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz Germany.

The presenter at the Travel Writer's symposium

So you see, never a dull moment in this writer's life. I'm making an effort to catch up with my blogging too, and hope to regain some of the readership that no doubt I lost when I neglected to post here for months on end.

I'm not working on a novel now, other than retyping my old Celtic tale "Dragons in the Sky" which I will start work on later this summer. My plan is to write poetry this summer while I'm on holidays. I have an idea for a poetry chap-book containing poems about Greece. We'll see how successful this project will be as I find poetry has to just come to me, a whisper from the Muse. So, it will be more of a summer of exploring, starting with Stonehenge and Avebury and a visit to Old Sarum on the Salisbury Plain (that is part of my research for the Dragons novel), and lot of new destinations to check out in Greece that will supply me with more travel stories for the coming year.

Stay tuned, and keep track of me on my travel blog.

photo of me by Julie Fergusonphoto of the flying gulls, by me, taken on a boat sailing from Aegina.